How about YOUR knowledge in English?

[Hoppla-Daisy]

I had the pleasure to stay at my friend's house during my last 2 weeks in London. They were Irish (Irish people living in Brixton ). My friend's accent was ok, but his parents' accent was groase to my ears!!!!!!!!! Gosh, once again I thought I didn't know any English at all!!!!!! But I got used to it rather quickly

The Irish are wonderful people. They didn't know me that well, but they gave me my own key and showed me where I could find this and that. And we all cried when I had to leave *wheeep*

[Muriel]

oh yes, that sounds indeed very Irish

[dreamchaser]

Well, I started my English career quite young, maybe at the age of 1 or 2: since my aunt is married to a Welshman and they live in Wales, we often went there and my mum started to talk in English to me from the beginning (one of my first books was "I can read German"). Unfortunately, I refused to go on with it, when I was a bit older - and I had to start to learn it again, when I started with high school (where I was realy eager to learn it, since my parents talked in English to each other, when they didn't want me to understand), only that I already understood everything the teachers said, and it became quite boring. So I went on with these English classes for 9 years, with exchange to Cambridge - after my school-leaving examinations I started to study English and German at university and got my first diploma in English. Having changed to medicine, I had to look for new opportunities to speak english. So I started to work for the exchange organization "dfa", where I got to know many students from all over the world with their different accents - quite challenging! And now I have friends all over the world, with which I keep in touch. Just that I sometimes mix it up, to whom have to write in English and to whom in Italian (I'd consider my french from school as completely lost).

[etlien]

Since I was little (ok, I am still not very tall... bad joke), I am fascinated by the english language. It started early, I can remember me sitting on the kitchen table trying to count: "one, two, three, eins, zwei, drei" while my father was enjoying what I did (BTW neither he nor my mother is a native speaker, he just enjoyed teaching me to count )

Later, I must have been in primary school (because I could read) I found in my fathers room a small book, a german-english dictionary. I can still remember what it looked like: It was blue and had really old, brown pages. But that didn´t bother me at all, I made my own dictionary with all the words I had already learnd to write in school (in german of course): Baum=Tree, Haus=House and so on. I am really sad, I don´t have this self-made dictionary any more.

In 5th grade I started to learn English, in 8th grade I did a language course in Margate, England, in 9th grade a students exchange from school. In 12th grade I chose English as major course.
I went with church to a small town in the east of England and the "final journey" in 13th grade was of course to London - where else?

Last year I went again to London with my boyfriend, who had never been there, and had the time of my life (I just like the sound of real British-English*hihi*). At the moment I am planing PJ in England, but all the questionnaire make me go crazy.

I love speaking english although I know my grammar and my spelling are worse. I try to speak english as often as I can, but in most cases I do while talking to myself (which I do more often than you should know). On the one hand, this is good, because I am used to speak english... on the other hand there´s no-one correcting my mistakes...

So, I have to go and think of a birthday present for my mum.

Bye, etlien

[Kedar]

Well, as most people I learned my first english words in 5th grade at school. But fortunately we moved to Norway when I was about 14, so there I learned quite a lot english (no norwegian TV shows at all, if u don´t cout Hotel Cesar ;) ) So that improved my english, then I studied chemistry in english for about one year and now I´m studying medicine in english. Most of my friends down here are native english speakers (just one german and 2 scandinavian friends).